TheBrain v10 Alpha is available

Posted by Paul J. Miller
Sep 2, 2018 at 07:34 AM

tightbeam wrote:
>How silly and shrill. Microsoft doesn’t “hold your documents and files as
>a hostage against future payments.”

You try opening an Access database in another program. Go on. I really would like to find an alternative program which can open an Access database and interpret all the calculations, queries and forms correctly.

The reason for this is that I had a particularly important database on Access. I am a diabetic and managed my condition with the aid of an Access database. I built a ‘bolus dose advisor’ in Access which would give me advice on a sensible dose for the current conditions.

When Microsoft refused to re-activate my license for Office 2010 (on the same computer it was first installed on) then I had to come up with a replacement pretty quickly.

The easy but expensive option would be to pay Microsoft for another license (either buying a license or paying Danegeld to Microsoft).

The stopgap solution was to re-create the calculations in a spreadsheet, and that is what I did. The spreadsheet was not very sophisticated, the calculations didn’t use previous data to calculate the ratios, the ratios were entered manually.

The better and more permanent solution was to re-create the Access database in Libre Office Base. This proved to be more difficult than it should have been, Base is a totally different animal to Access. Access is much better. I had to learn SQL and a whole lot more to be able to do something this sophisticated in Base.

I now have an adequate solution working, although it is not as good as the Access database, I am working on it.

The reason SaaS is being pushed so heavily by the software companies is that customers do end up paying more over the long term and SaaS gives the companies a steady and predictable revenue stream. But the bottom line is that the customer does end up paying more for the software over the long term and has no security that the company will not suddenly change either their payments or make changes to the software itself (an upgrade) which will require them to change the way they do things.

SaaS gives companies more power over their customers and more money from their customers. The danger is that it will come to be seen as the ‘norm’.